All right, let me go ahead and get started. Please do finish eating. That way I'm confident that you're getting something of value out of this session.
My name is Larry McInerney. Let me tell you a little bit about why I'm here and what we're going to talk about and why I hope I can be valuable for you. I'm the head of the writing program here at the University of Chicago.
But what's probably more relevant to you is that I have a long-standing consulting practice, not only with other universities, but with a lot of professional firms, businesses, NGO, policy institutes, etc., who hire me. to come to work with people who are working for them that they have hired mostly out of places like the University of Chicago. And they hire me in a desperate attempt to, this is going to sound overdramatic, to save your jobs. This is way overdramatic, but sometimes not. I just had, last month, I had a, for break, I had somebody from a professional firm come and spend a week with me here in Chicago because he was about to lose his job.
for writing issues. What is so frustrating to everybody about this is that the writing issues involved are actually conceptually extremely simple. They are so much easier than the stuff you people study.
What I do is so easy. What you do is so hard that it frustrates everybody that people who are the best in the world at this hard stuff have trouble with what's actually pretty simple. pretty easy stuff. So what I'm here to talk to you about is two levels. One is sort of a high level, explaining why it is that people who are really, really smart, something faculty at the University of Chicago, students at the University of Chicago, really smart people, why do they have trouble writing effectively?
Just why is that? Writing doesn't seem to be that hard. All right, give me a first contribution. Why is it, why do I have a job?
Why do people who are really smart have trouble writing? Well. That's beautiful. Say that.
What do you mean? Can you elaborate a little bit? Because, like, most of our, like, things we do is reading, accumulating knowledge.
Right. But we don't express it that much often. I want to pull this a little more out. He says you're not you. to writing well.
I can't agree, this is so important and I agree so much, but I want to push it in a way that you probably didn't even mean. I would be willing to bet that over the course of your careers, you've done a lot of writing. You've been in school for how many years?
16, 18, 20 I'm sorry I walk around with a t-shirt actually I work out with a t-shirt that says graduate student because I'm still officially a graduate student at the University of Chicago, well actually I'm not, I would be if 15 years ago they hadn't realized that they needed to cut me off because I skew the data results, you know they need to get people finishing and when you've got somebody who's who's been on the campus since 1977, then doesn't look good for the statistics. Very, very sensitive subject of how long we have been in school. Get it?
You've done enormous amounts of writing, though. You've done enormous amounts of writing. Why hasn't that prepared you to write well?
Serious question. You've done enormous amounts of writing in your life. How is it possible that you can walk out of this campus and not write well? I'm going to make it more extreme, just to be controversial.
You haven't been required to write at all. I'm obviously being intentionally provocative, right? I haven't done any writing that's real writing, any of it, I would claim.
And that's the big picture difficulty you have. Today I want to talk a little bit about the big picture and then I want to talk about some very specific things so that we can spend some time working on specific techniques, specific, literally I don't know, have exercises in this handout so that by the time you leave today you'll have actually done some specific things that you can walk out tomorrow and do differently with your writing. But I want to spend a moment on the big picture stuff. You've been writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing and writing. But it's not real for a couple of reasons.
This is the one I'm going to be most aggravating about. When I work with writers of almost all sorts, there's usually four characteristics of their writing that matter. They need their writing to be clear, organized, persuasive. The bottom two are not very interesting, a little bit, but the top one is valuable.
When you leave as a student, whether you're a professor or working outside the academy, the most important thing about your writing is that it be valuable. And I would argue that not only have you not learned how to do this, you've learned habits that work against your ability to make your writing valuable. Why? The jargony part I don't worry about. One of the things I should tell you is that I spend a lot of time sort of not saying things that most people say.
Most people say that if you're writing outside the academy you shouldn't use jargon. That's just demonstrably false. it turns out there are certain ways that you use jargon that feel valuable to the readers and certain ways you use it that destroys value. You need to learn how to use it in a way that feels valuable.
To say just don't use it, that's just crazy. I mean, it's impossible. Here's the approach that I take to writing that I should introduce at this moment. Most of you have been taught things about writing that are what we call text-based. That is, somebody's given you advice about what your text should look like.
They say something like, don't use jargon. Or they say something like, have a thesis sentence. Or they say something like, don't use passive verbs.
All these are ridiculous things to say. But the point is, they make sense to you, and they shouldn't. Because there are rules about the text itself.
That is, there are rules about what a text should look like. We think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of language. Anytime somebody tells you, gives you advice about writing that's text-based. They say something like, keep your sentences short.
I hope from now on in the back of your head, you say, for which readers and what purpose? Because we think no advice about writing makes any sense unless you've clarified who's reading it and the function of the text. And you don't think that way.
Nobody says to you, here's a good advice about writing. Don't have more than six sentences in a paragraph. You say, okay. And we want you to say, not that that's wrong.
It doesn't make any sense because you haven't told me which readers and what function. Here's what we teach. We teach our specialty at the University of Chicago is what we call expert writing. That is, we work with people who are experts. in the way they think about the world.
I work with biochemists, neurobiologists, anthropologists, historians, lawyers, fill in the blank. They have one thing in common. They're experts in the way they think about the world. They deal with very complicated information, lots of subtlety, lots of nuance, lots of sophistication, lots of complexity. And they think at very high levels.
They also write. Now, 99% of them write and think. At the same time. That is, they use their writing process to help themselves to think.
You do this. While you're writing your stuff, you're still thinking of your ideas. To help yourself do your thinking, you have to do your writing. You have to do this because the stuff you're thinking about is too damn complicated to just do it in your head.
You should know that in classical rhetoric, that's an enormous mistake. I was taught in a classical model that says there are two separate functions. There's the thinking process and there's the writing process, as I constantly tell the story.
I had a high school English teacher who said to me, Larry, there's two processes. There's thinking, there's writing. The said, you're not ready to write until you're done thinking. Miss Johnson.
And she said, to enforce this, I'm going to make sure that when you turn in every essay you turn into me, you're going to turn in the outline that you use to do your thinking. This was not a problem. So...
First I wrote the paper, then I wrote the outline, because it was inconceivable to me that you can just think and then do the writing. Well, almost everybody's like me. They think and write and write and think and think and write and write and think and think and write and write and think.
Okay. This is a very good thing. And you should make sure that nothing I do today interferes with this process.
Because this is how you do your best thinking. But in the real world, not in school, in the real world, when you're done with this, you will have created a text. You will send that text to your readers. And in the real world, not the world you're in now, the function of that text is to cause readers to change what they think about the world. That's its job.
It's to cause the readers to change what they think about the world. And whether or not it's valuable depends on whether or not the readers perceive that you have valuably changed what they think, or what they do, or how they decide. And I would be willing to bet that in your schooling years, you virtually never did that.
Was that what your writing was for as a student? When you wrote a paper, did you fail the paper if you didn't change what the teacher thought about the world? Was that the test? Was that how you got an A, B, C, D, or F?
I'm getting a lot of those, like some of you are saying, was it the test? Was it? Alright, let's make it, let's start in high school.
When you were writing in high school, were you changing the way your teachers saw the world when you wrote those high school papers? How about college? Were you changing the way your instructors saw the world when you wrote those college papers? I mean, every once in a while, I have somebody say, well, yeah.
I had professors tell me that my work was so valuable to them. That was a lie? I mean, you know that.
At least it was a lie in the sense of it didn't change what they thought. You know how I know it was a lie? Because if you had changed what they thought, they should have published your paper.
Sometimes I have faculty say to me, oh, the student's writing is very helpful to me. I say, yeah. They say, oh, yeah, I really do. I learn a lot. I say, yeah.
I say, yeah. I say, then your student, reading your student's stuff is part of your thinking process. Yeah.
I say, okay. then how often do you go find student papers to read when you don't have to? And what's the answer? Never! All right?
All right. What made your writing valuable to them? What created the value for them?
Your writing didn't. What did? Pardon me? Here's what they did. Oh, I mean, I offend people with this, but let me tell you.
Here's what you did in school, and you're still doing it right now. You're writing a paper, I don't know, a couple of pages, ten pages, three pages. You're attaching a $100 bill to it, and you're handing it to your instructor and saying, Hey, will you read this?
Sure thing. You think that's not what's happening? Really? Seriously?
Do you think that's not what's happening? This is what's happening! And people say, oh, it's so awful that you talk about money. Now, let's say you go outside being a student. I'm not just talking about beyond the academy.
Let's say you want to be a professor. and you write an article, is that what's going to happen? Whether you're a professor or a consultant or in any other kind of real-world operation, are you going to write something and hand 100 bucks to your readers to read it? He's nodding his head.
Is that what's going to happen? What's going to happen? Now. They don't have to read it.
Not only this, but it's more than that. What's going to happen? If you waste your time you're going to make this. You want to get paid. Right?
Yes? No? Yeah. Do you? Forgive me, I won't pick on her.
Do you want to get paid? Anybody here want to get paid? Here's what you're saying now.
You're saying, here you can read this, but you've got to pay me. me first. You can't read this until you pay me. And I have to tell you, you have 16, 18, 20 years of not doing that. You've never written anything, I would argue, at all.
The problem is that doesn't just leave you neutral, that leaves you with terrible habits. Why is it so hard for really smart people to write well? One of the reasons is they have 20 years of bad habits. it was, they weren't writing to people who were doing this. What were they writing to?
What were your teachers doing when you sent them papers? Were they using your papers to change the way they saw the world? What were they using your papers to do?
Very roughly put, you have learned to write in what Wittgenstein would call a form of life in which your readers were paid to care about you. Your teachers read your stuff because they were paid to read it to find out about you. Well, he's handed in this new thing.
I'm going to read this. Why? Because somebody's paying me to assess him.
That's never going to happen again, right? Whether you're in the academy or not, nobody is ever going to be paid to care about you ever again. But because you guys are so successful, you are the best people in the world at student kind of writing. You're very good at it.
Trouble is that's not what you need to do afterwards, after school. As a director of the writing program here on campus, I often get asked about helping undergraduates make the transition from high school to college. We help them.
It's not very difficult. Or I'm asked to help undergraduate students make the transition from undergraduate to high school. at the graduate school. We help them.
It's not very difficult. What is really difficult is the transition from being in school to being out of school, because this value issue suddenly dominates everything. And you've had 20 years of never having to deal with it.
Never having to deal with it. So that's the big picture hard part of it. As I said, we're going to talk about some specifics, but those specifics in my mind only make any sense inside this larger problem of what I'm stealing from Wittgenstein called the form of life. You enter into a different form of life.
Language is a different activity. It's a different language game from being in school to being out of school. So I don't want to talk.
We'll talk about text, but I only want to talk about it in terms of the language game of readers who need you to make your text valuable to them in their reading process because I'm claiming that's a different language game. All right, turn to the first page of your handout, and let's get started looking at some specifics. So, on the first page, I've given you three instances of a text that's either by Roger Meyerson or partially by Roger Meyerson. Do you need a handout? Anybody else need a handout?
Okay. Roger Meyerson, whom some of you may know, is a great writer. You very well may know personally, I should say I don't, really interesting writer. Here's three examples of his writing. One's from the Journal of Economic Theory, number two is from the New York Times, and number three is from a journal called Journal of...
of conflict resolution. Do me a favor, take a minute and just scan these quickly. You don't have to read them to figure out the content of it.
Scan it and describe, tell me some of the things that somebody would say about the differences in the writing between these three. cases. One that's definitely inside the Academy, the Journal of Economic Theory, one that's definitely outside the Academy, the New York Times, and one that's sort of in the middle, the Journal of Conflict Resolution. Take a quick look at them.
Thank you All right, now, let's say somebody asks you the question, how are these texts different? And I hope now, for the rest of your life, you have a little voice in the back of your head that says, well, wait a minute, let's talk about readers and function, but let's imagine that you're not talking about that and they won't let you talk about that. They're just saying, how are these texts as texts different? Point to something that's different between them or that people would point out as different.
The first one is very descriptive. Descriptive, all right? How so? Give me an example of being descriptive. Well, it looks like terms like expected action profile and the conditional probability in the hyperplane.
So he explains that kind of equation. Well... It's descriptive, but take contrast that, would you say that three is not descriptive? Or two?
To put this in perspective, imagine if President Obama named Democrats. Is he not, are they not describing there? Okay, it's all right. So give me some other things that people would say, well, this is obviously different between these.
The readers are different. For sure, and we're going to talk about that. Actually, the readers are in many ways quite similar. We're going to talk about that. But I want to imagine what somebody who's just trying to describe the text.
would say? The frame of reference, the second is something that anyone could relate to. Okay, so when we say something, I'm obviously scared you about saying, oh my god the first one has equations in it! You know, oh my god! That's obviously different, the first one has equations, the other ones don't use equations.
Right, just to be textually simple. Alright? Notice some other things textual about this. We don't talk about things like describing, textual. The sentences in the second one are shorter.
The sentences are literally shorter. Just look. Look at the first paragraph of number two. See how many sentences there are there?
One, two, three, four. There's four sentences in it. How about the same length in number one?
How many sentences does number one have? Two. How many sentences does number three have?
Three. All right? So here's what somebody's going to tell you when you go out to work in a place that's not the academy.
They're going to say, Oh, my God, use short sentences. They will say that to you. Use short sentences.
And they will point to this and say, Look, these are shorter sentences. They won't ask the question, why are they shorter sentences? What is it about the readers that makes it shorter sentences?
What do you think it is about the readers of the New York Times that makes it a good idea to use shorter sentences there? It is a good idea to use shorter sentences in general in a New York Times op-ed piece. Why?
What do you suppose is true about the readers of the New York Times op-ed piece? That makes shorter sentences probably a good idea. They don't have so much time to read. What's the value to a reader of a New York Times op-ed piece? What makes it valuable to them?
Possibly, but that's probably not why most people read New York Times op-ed pieces. People say that? They say, oh yes, it's like, you know, I read it for the article, I read it for information. Probably not. for example, in the train, that it's easy to make shorter sentences?
One thing is they may not be sitting at their desk reading it. They're reading it on a train, someplace in a car, moving, walking, or something. So a longer sentence is going to demand their attention for milliseconds longer.
That's actually kind of awkward and that kind of. But the other thing is, what value do they get out of it? So, and it's an interesting point, right? What's the difference between reading an op-ed piece and reading a news, hard news piece? Saying that one is purely supposed to inform whereas the other is supposed to present...
And what? Present and what? Entertain. And if you think that's not the case, talk to the editors of the New York Times.
Why do people watch television or listen to radio that have... People, we moan it all the time. Oh, why do people listen to these demagogic journalists who are just spouting their opinions? Why are they listening to Rush Limbaugh and Rachel Maddow? Why don't they just get objective journalism?
Well, why don't they? Because it's more fun. Come on.
I have lots of colleagues who come to me, Roger's not one of them, trying to get stuff published in the New York Times, and the first thing I say to them is, the New York Times, I'm not going to publish this because nobody's going to read it. And they say, but people are interested in this! Everybody's interested in the Ukraine right now, everybody's interested in this! But this is boring!
And that's what I suppose they do, they look at me. And they say, well, I can't be responsible for the fact that people aren't rigorous in their thinking. But why the short sentence, entertaining more people?
Why do you think? Because people are able to judge if that content is boring or not. Yeah, see, this is the mistake you're making. Because what I do for a living is not think about the relationship between the writer in the world or the text in the world. My job is to think about how readers read.
You're thinking about content. I'm thinking about closer to somebody standing in a subway and the process that's actually going on in their cognitive processing to do this. And you know what happens?
When we read, we're using all kinds of cognitive processing to use this text to think about the world. And what happens when you interfere with the cognitive process, when the text makes it hard to do the process? What happens to readers when there's something about the text that makes it interfering with the reading process?
What do you suppose readers do? I can tell you what they do. The first thing is they slow down.
The second thing is they don't understand. The third thing is they get annoyed. And the fourth thing is they stop! And I got all kinds of people in your position who say, well, that's not my responsibility. Isn't it their job to read?
When they're teachers, you've been writing, you've been writing ineffectively and your readers haven't put it down. Why not? Because you were paying them to read it. When that stops happening, now your job is to make sure that process is valuable for the reader all the time.
And you've never had to do that before. You've never had to make the reading process feel valuable for the readers as they go. Now, in the first one, Roger Meyerson can write a big, long sentence which doesn't feel valuable to the readers until they get to the end of the sentence.
He writes a lot of sentences where the value to the reader appears at the end of the sentence, and he can take him three or four lines to get there. And when he's writing in the Journal of Economic Theory, he can do that because his readers will get to the end of that sentence. But when you're writing in the New York Times, you can't. They won't get there.
They won't get there. Does it mean you have to write short sentences in the New York Times? No. You can write very, very long sentences in the New York Times and be very successful. But you have to know how to make, then, parts of sentences feel valuable to readers before they get to the end.
You can't have the value sitting just at the end. Because they won't get there. Doesn't that mean that you should always write short sentences?
No. Sure. No.
It's a great question. It's a great question. There's several reasons for it. One of them is that in English, and it's true of lots of other languages too, the end of a sentence has...
What we call a stress position. That is, ending of sentences have extra stress compared to the rest of the sentence. Quite surprising to people who've been told the beginning of the sentence is where readers pay the most attention. It's not true. It's actually they pay attention at the end of the sentence.
All right? Well, this would say, well, then I should use lots of short sentences. But think about it.
Let's say one version of it has six of these. Another version has three. Can you feel the difference? This one is saying to readers, hey readers, there's six really important things I want you to notice in this passage. This one says, hey readers, there's three.
Well, imagine if this goes on for several pages. Pretty soon... You say, this is important, this is important, this is important, this is important, this is important, this is important. And pretty soon, nothing is important.
What you know how to do when you command longer English sentences is you know how to have smaller moments of importance. Forgive me for quoting a very long sentence, but this is a famous sentence, and it was given in a speech, but it shows what I mean here. It's the last sentence of Lincoln's second inaugural.
With malice toward... none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right. Let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds. to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow and orphan, to do all which shall achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.
Well, the end of that whole thing is peace among ourselves and with all nations. And he wants that to get the most stress. But along the way, he's manipulated the sentence so that other things have lesser sense, lesser stress building to that.
So, sorry, that wasn't actually on the agenda. It's a great question. The point I'm trying to make is not that there's all kinds of cool language techniques that you don't know and can learn.
Wow, that's really nice. My point is you already know everything you need to know about English language technique. But you haven't been trained in how to think about how to use that technique to create value. You know what you've been trained in? You've been trained in how to use language to reveal what's in your mind or how your, what your abilities are.
You've been trained to use language to demonstrate to your teachers, here's what I know and here's what I can do. Here's what I can do. And those are the habits you have.
You know the techniques, I promise you. It's a question of redeploying them to doing a different function, to live in a different language game afterwards. Notice some other things about the text differences.
Notice that not only in the second one. The sentences are shorter. They don't need to be shorter, but it's smart to make them shorter because you have to have higher language skills to make longer sentences valuable.
Notice in the second paragraph, the writers are doing something that some of you may have been told is against the rule. You notice they start a sentence with because? In the second paragraph?
You ever been told you shouldn't start a sentence with because? You notice in the second line at the bottom, they start a sentence with and? You ever been told you shouldn't start a sentence with and?
How would you account for the fact that they do it? They start a sentence with because, they start a sentence with and? If you've been told, oh, you shouldn't do that, there's a rule against that.
And you just, uh... Some very respectable people doing it. A lot of people usually account for that. I see it because at the beginning of the sentence I know I'm going to learn something.
Oh, alright, no, no, it's a very good thing. It's a very good thing to do it. I'm saying, you've all been told that you shouldn't do this.
Imagine you went back to the teacher who said, you told me I shouldn't do it, but look. What would that teacher say? Do you think? When the New York Times pays you to do it.
The teacher says one of two things. One is, oh, that's the New York Times. They don't follow the rules there.
Or they do this thing like, when you're important enough and powerful enough, then you get to do it. I tell you, both of this is, this is one of the things I'm getting at. You've been taught a whole lot of rules about texts that are nonsense.
There is no such rule that you start a sentence with because. because, or you shouldn't start a sentence with and. There is no such rule that you shouldn't split infinitives.
There is no such rule that you shouldn't use passive verbs. Go down the line almost no matter what you've been told about writing is wrong, as if they say a rule. The big exception is spelling.
Keep spelling. Other than that, these are crazy. People say, I'm being hypercritical.
hyperbolic, but my mentor, the guy who started the writing program at the University of Chicago, in 1979 wrote a wonderful article for the Journal of English Teachers, College English Teachers. And he said, all these rules you people are teaching, stop teaching them because they're not rules. They said, when actual readers read texts and think about the world, none of these rules make any difference.
It's a brilliant article, 15 page long. And in the last paragraph, he says, okay. OK, did you get the joke? This article has more than 100 errors in it.
More than 100. And he says to his readers, how many did you notice while you were reading? Errors. And the answer was they didn't notice any of them. Because they're not errors. They didn't notice them because they were actually reading a text to think about the world.
But once they read that paragraph, what do you suppose they all did? They got their red pens out, they went back to the beginning and said, oh, there's one, there's one, there's one, there's one. And one great sentence, one sentence has seven errors in it. He and I helped him with this.
We had so much fun, you know, writing these sentences. It has seven errors in it, including the fact that the verb is... The subject is singular and the verb is plural.
Like a basic rule, right? Nobody noticed? There's no such rule! For me, language is not rule following.
It's controlling the reading process. It's understanding how... readers read.
And I was saying to you, and there's lots of times when a singular subject and a plural verb works better for readers. All of these rules don't make sense to me because they're not rules, they're techniques. Language is a technique for controlling a reader's reading process.
And if you're sitting there looking at your text not thinking about readers, but thinking about rules, you're probably writing badly. Because you just just kind of got it wrong, I think, what language is for. So if we looked at this stuff, the reason I gave you these passages is to say, here's what people normally say about shifting from the academy to not in the academy. They say you have to do things like stop using equations.
That's the jargon thing. They say stop using jargon. They say make your sentences shorter.
They say all kinds of things that have to do with textual characteristics. I'm here to say none of that's actually... what's at stake.
What's at stake and what is in fact the same about these three texts is that they all create value for their readers. Roger Meyerson, in all three of these instances, is creating value for the reading process. He's making it valuable for people to read it. How? There's lots of techniques.
I want to talk about one that goes to the next page. Look at the beginnings. Now this is the openings of these articles.
Tell me what these have in common. I'm sorry, it's page three on the numeration. One, this paper develops some fundamental mathematical tools for analyzing games with a very large number of players, such as the games played by voters in a large election.
Now go to two. However the current crisis over Crimea finally ends, Ukraine will still be left with a crisis of its own politics. Three, management consultants have many theories of leaderships. I'm going to go to the second sentence here.
Leaders are often... glorified as visionary strategic planners who set the course with bold, insightful decisions, but Xenophon gives us a different view. What do these things have in common?
There's a lot of differences between them. Can you see anything that they have in common? Actually, I'll tell you what they have in common.
You tell me how they're doing it. Each one of them is making the reading valuable for the reader. How?
It's not a be about so you know whether it's valuable to you. No, but thank God you said that. No, I mean this is so, this is so, this is so important. I know you said that, but it's crucial. You ever heard something, you said it tells what the paper will be about.
Sorry about my handwriting. That's what you said. You ever heard advice like, tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them.
This is not a source of value. Why not? Imagine this. Can you imagine in a first sentence telling you, this paper is going to be about X, and for you to decide, I don't care about X. I don't care.
It's of no value to me to know anything about X. Then what are you going to do? People look at me like, oh my god.
And the first thought is, you want me to lie? You want me to cheat? You want me to use rhetoric or something to sell this stuff? And they look at me like, that's all wrong. That's all morally wrong.
It's kind of slimy. People say, shouldn't that be what writing is about? I say, isn't that what writing is?
Isn't writing to be about something? Yes? No?
Is that what you do in your papers? When you write a paper, do you describe something? Is that what you do in a paper? Is that what professional academics do?
Is that what professional academic papers do? Do they describe things? Is that their function? Now, you'll hear at least the next thing is they make arguments.
They argue. So there would be a difference, which is what the paper will argue. Can you feel that those might be different? One says, here's what my paper will be about.
Another says, here's what my paper will argue. My paper will argue that. For example, my paper will argue that cultural constructions are dynamic.
As opposed to saying, this paper is about cultural constructions. Those are different. Pardon me? The second one sounds more fun. Okay, but is that what academics do?
Do they persuade? Do they make arguments? Professional academics in their published work.
Is that what they do? What do they do? What do 98% of academic papers do? Say again?
That's better! Can you see how different that is? The opening tells us what question the paper will answer.
Can you see a difference between these three? Can you feel a difference between these three? What's the difference? What's the difference? In some sense, this whole, everything I do, my entire career is summed up.
That's why I was, forgive me for jumping on this one thing. But everything I teach is summed up in these three. Everything. The ladder of students is a problem.
So we'll put numbers on them just so we can talk about it, make sure we're clear on that. What's the difference? That's one way to put it. In your own words, describe the difference between these three. I would say this way.
This one for sure makes room for the reader. You know what would be even better than this one? What if this says, it tells, whoops, I should say tell us, tells you what question you have that the paper will answer.
Now do you see a difference? What about this one? Tells us what the paper will be about.
There's no place for a reader there. The reader has no role. The only person with a role here is the writer.
The writer is going to talk about the world. The writer will talk about the world. Writing about the world. Tells what the paper is about.
See that? There is no space for a function for the reader here, except one function, which is the teacher's function, which is, show me what you know about this thing. Show me how much you know about it. And if you pay me, I'll read it, and I'll give you my judgment about what you know. But there's no other value embedded in that language.
So how is Roger Meyerson shifting more toward this? Roger doesn't just do this. Look at the very first one.
What does he say at the beginning that's not just, here's what this is about? Point me to a word in the first sentence that says this is not just about. This is actually valuable.
How about that one? Tools. What's the difference between the word tools and the word ideas? He says tools. Tools implies purpose, use, and value.
Ideas does not. The word tools, right there, is extremely important. conveying to our readers, this has a function for you!
You're gonna be able to use this! When was the last time you used the word tool in any of your writing? You would have said ideas, concepts.
Roger Meyerson's a very good writer. How about methods? Methods, not quite as good as tools.
But what's really good about this one isn't the first sentence. It's the next one. In such games, it is unrealistic to assume that every player knows all the other players in the game. Instead, a more realistic model should admit some uncertainty about the number of players in the game. What's that sentence doing there?
Is it describing? You could say it's describing, but what is it describing? Do they go from unrealistic to realistic cases? What's it describing?
This is a trick question. What is it describing? He says, it is unrealistic to assume that every player's know all the other players in the game. Pardon me?
There are people that. People who do that. There are people who assume exactly that. Who are these people?
His readers. You know what academic papers mostly do? They look their readers in the eye and say, I know what you think and you're wrong.
You know what Roger's just done in this sentence? He said, hey readers of the Journal of Economic Theory, I know what you think, and it's unrealistic. Which is polite term for what? You're wrong. Worse, you're generating bad ideas and models because you're wrong in what you're assuming.
You shouldn't assume it anymore. Stop assuming it. This is not, as it were, about the world. This is about his readers.
He's describing his readers. He's saying to them, hey readers, this question you actually don't have, but you ought to have. Can you see how that creates a value for his work? And it's, forgive me, but it's not just a matter of interesting. Some people say, well, it's more interesting if you're confrontational.
It's not just interesting. Believe me, there's a lot of people who don't like confrontation and they don't want to argue. But when an academic's professional job is to be right about this stuff and somebody looks them in the eye and says, hey, it's your job to be right about this and you say, yeah, it is, and you're wrong, you have to listen.
It's like going to medical doctors and saying to medical doctors, hey, medical doctors, you're treating this disease with this drug, right? The doctor says, yes. Stop! You're killing people!
You've got to pay attention to that. Value. He's creating value. That's what he's doing for specific readers, right?
This notion, oh my god, people get told, okay when you go outside the academy you should write as though you're writing to sixth graders. Oh my god, don't! You know who you have to write to? Your readers. And you know what you have to know about them?
What they value. Do not write to sixth graders. Your job is not to reveal your head. Your job is to change their heads. You need to know what they think, and you crucially need to know what they value.
So, we'll come back to the New York Times one. Go down to the third one. Management consultants have many theories of leadership.
Leaders are often glorified as visionary strategic planners who set the course with bold, insightful decisions, but Xenophon gives us a different view. What's Roger doing there? What's he doing there?
What's the function of this opening, do you think? Do leaders who are men? Yeah.
And what's he doing with these people who are management consultants? Telling them that their theory is wrong. Right.
He's looking them in the eye and saying, I know what you think. You think leaders are glorified as visionary strategic planners. And then what is the significance of saying Xenophon gives a different view?
It's a polite way of saying what? You're wrong. It's a polite way of saying you're wrong. It's just a jargon.
It's a code for you're wrong. And why is he, why does he open with talking about what management consultants think? Why would he talk about them? Because they're the people who read the Journal of Conflict Resolution.
See what I mean? This isn't determined by the world at all. This is determined by his readers. This is being driven by his sense of his readers and how to create value for them.
Now, I should be clear, outside the academy, it's less common to say to your readers, I know what you think and you're wrong. Inside the academy, 95% of most academic writing does that. It says to, that's an exaggeration, 85% of academic writing does that. You say to your readers, I know what you think and you're wrong.
you're wrong. We have very polite ways of saying it. We have all this kind of coding language for it, but that's what we mostly do.
Outside the academy, it turns out problems value is much more diverse. Sometimes you say to your students, you know, you're going readers, I know what you think and you're wrong. Sometimes you say to your readers, I know what's valuable to you and I can do that.
I know what you need and this text can provide that. But you open with what they need, not Here's what the text is going to be about Because if you open with here's what the text is going to be about you run the risk of them saying I don't care about that Because they may not see the value of that Yeah, and I'm trying to find the same thing right Right, so what's the vet how is he creating value in this one? However, the current crisis over Crimea finally ends, Ukraine will be still left with a crisis of its own politics. A crisis that Russia sees as a pretext to annex Crimea and would invite further intervention in Ukraine unless it is immediately addressed. Why does this create value?
There's a little bit, by the way, there is a little bit of it. I know what you think and you're wrong. The hint of that is here. The origin of the current emergency, in fact, lie in the failure of Ukraine's political institutions to accomplish two fundamental tasks, but that's really, it's only faint and not important. What's creating value for people?
Why would people continue to read this? What would be the value in it to them? Imagine if I wrote it this way.
However the current situation in Crimea resolves, Ukraine will still be left with a situation of its own. A situation that involves Russia in its relationship to Crimea and would have further implications for the Ukraine. 90% of the readers of it would put it down. Why? There's no sense of urgency in this.
And why do words like crisis, crisis, seized, Russia seizing, Russia seizes, right? Why does it create a sense of urgency in our reading of it? Pardon me?
Those words are kind of active. Yeah, but they're not just that. You're right.
You're absolutely right about that. We value reading about bad stuff. You laugh? You think you don't? Look at the newspaper tomorrow.
What's the headline going to be? Is it going to be, Something Good Happened? How about this? Headline in the newspaper, Yesterday, Nothing Changed. How about this?
Go to a movie the next time. You imagine walking into a movie. And imagine sitting down in a movie theater and having the first five minutes of the movie say, see these people?
They're very good. very content, they're fine, and for the next hour and a half, they're going to stay fine. And we're going to show you the details of their contentedness.
You going to watch that movie? You going to watch it? No!
Why not? Is it not true? Do you not want to understand people? How come people don't want to watch it? How come you don't want to watch it?
It's not entertaining. You want people to read your op-ed pieces in the New York Times? Better entertain them.
That's the case. That's just the case. Turns out there's lots of different ways to entertain people, but the most obvious one is to say, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, something's wrong, oh my God. That's what draws our attention.
That's what we value when we read. Now, is that a bad thing? I don't know, maybe, maybe it is.
But it's the truth. People, when they're looking for entertainment, are drawn to conflict, tension, trouble. And we find it entertaining.
Roger Meyerson understands that. He doesn't begin this by saying, this will be an op-ed piece about the Ukraine and will contain suggestions for future policy in Ukraine. Because if he wrote that sentence, nobody would know. ...would read the second sentence. Not nobody, but very few people in his audience would read the second sentence.
So such as breaking news, like airplane crash, so in your sense, I mean, would it be valuable in terms of in the context of New York Times? Breaking news, airplane crash. Have you ever heard breaking news, airplane landed safely?
Right? We are drawn. The New York Times is a mass media.
It has to have lots and lots of people looking at it. But the crucial point I'm trying to make is that one of the crucial values we get from the New York Times is actually entertainment or at least distraction. So we want to be distracted.
We pick up the New York Times, we want to be distracted. Do we want to get information? Well, the people who read the New York Times want to feel better than the people who read USA Today. They want to feel better about themselves.
This is true, right? Now, are they better? I leave that to you to judge, but I promise you they want to feel better about it. This sounds to people like I'm being corrosively cynical. And I have to say, I don't think so.
I deal with language as a relationship among people. You guys have been taught to deal with language as a way of revealing what you think. And I think you're just... Wrong.
Language is social. It's actually a relationship between you and other people. So for me, when I want to talk about language, I need to talk about the other people, not just about you. Because there's other people, to me, always in the equation.
So the first thing I wanted to talk about today, and we're basically done now, is one of the things when you're writing either inside the academy or outside the academy, you need to look at the patterns of your writing where what you're doing is just demonstrating, demonstrating, demonstrating. Say, I know this. I know this. I know this.
I know this. Here's how I know it. Here's my method of thinking. Here's this.
Just turn that off and be thinking from the first sentence of the reader's value. What's making it valuable for them? Why are they reading it?
They're not getting paid to read it. Therefore, from the first sentence, you've got to be describing not what you think, but what they think. How they engage this. and you've not been taught you've been taught to do the opposite of that now here's a small technique for doing that I promised I'd not just be at the realm of the ethereal but would be specific turn all the way up to page um um I'm going to skip a bunch of pages, turn up to page, let's pause at page 8, and then I'm going to move on to something else. Here's a classic mistake 1A by a, this happens to be a lawyer, but a lawyer is a well-trained academic who's trying to write to a client.
We won't go through the whole thing, but this is the opening sentence. The following discussion outlines obligations. concerning payments of overtime to the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act and the applicable regulations.
Forgive me for once again for coming back to the tell what the paper's about, but that's what the writer thought he was doing. It happened to be a he. He said, I'm telling the client what this is about. This is about obligations concerning payments of overtime under Federal Fair Labor Standards Act. Now the comparison might be unfair but look at the first sentence of the second one, 1B.
Dear client, you've asked whether the new federal wage and hours laws will affect your obligation to pay overtime and provide compensatory time to your employees. Can you see the difference? It's shocking, right?
It's just shocking. Now, sometimes people who write 1A say, but doesn't the client know that they wrote, that they asked that question? Well, what do you think about that? The lawyer who writes 1A says to me, but the client knows what question they asked.
Well, they might have forgotten, and that makes sense in this sense. I mean, clients sitting at the desk reading text after text after text after text picks this one up and doesn't remember necessarily what this one was about. But there's a way bigger issue here.
Do you know how to... many texts clients have read from lawyers that were useless, utterly, completely useless, and the client paid for the privilege of reading it. And it was useless for them.
So here's another message I have for you. Your readers do not trust you. They don't trust you.
They think you're going to waste their time. They think you're going to create stuff that's not valuable. for them.
They do not trust you and you spent 20 years with readers who trusted you. You spent 20 years writing to readers who are going to read everything you wrote and you've gotten used to the idea that you're whatever you write your readers just going to read. I can't tell you how wrong that is.
And I, philosophically, I think it's a gigantic mistake. Language is a relationship between people. And you think about them, I would argue, from the beginning.
One B signals to the reader that from the beginning, I have you in mind and this is about what's going to be valuable for you. So let me give you a more subtle example of that. If you turn to page, turn to page nine for a moment.
Top of page 9, we'll just use the first two sentences. The dog chased the cat and the cat was chased by the dog. And I apologize to anybody who's heard me talk about this. I use these sentences a lot. Which of those sentences is more clear and concise?
The dog chased the cat or the cat was chased by the dog? One? No. It depends.
And this is, I'm going back to where I opened with. When you try to make a decision about any piece of writing, your first question should be what? Who's reading it? Most of you would think the first sentence is more concise because you've been taught formal rules. Two rules you would come into play, right?
You'd say what about sentence one versus sentence two? It's shorter, and some of you have been taught you should use active verbs. verbs and not passive verbs.
Daylight nonsense. Clear nonsense. It is absurd to say that one is more clear or more concise than two.
What about the readers? Does it depends on readers? And what about the readers does it depend on? Say it.
If they care about the cat. If they care about the cat or if they care about the dog. Why would that make any difference?
You're right. The's absolutely right. But other people would say, what difference does that make? One sentence is still shorter. It makes it more concise.
They're wrong. Why? Because the way English works, the subject of the sentence is what we call the focus of the sentence. It's what the sentence is about.
The first sentence is about what? The dog. The second sentence is about what?
The cat. What if the reader wants to think about the cat? And they read the first sentence.
The dog chased the cat. Why is it not concise for them? They want to think about the cat.
I'm thinking about the cat, the cat, the cat, the cat. That's what I care about. That's what I value.
I want to think about the cat. And I read a sentence about a dog. What do I have to do cognitively? I have to flip it.
I have to process it twice. First I process it as a sentence about a dog, and I don't care about the dog. So I have to process the sentence again, making it into a sentence, that's something I care about.
It takes me longer to read it and understand it. understand it. And to us, that's what concision is. Concision isn't the number of words on the page. It's how long it takes readers to process what's on the page.
You know what I mean? You've got to put readers in the equation all the time. But didn't you also say the stress of the sentence happens at the end?
Ah, this is great. So here's how English works. It has This is a vast oversimplification, but it works like this. There's a focus of the sentence, and then there's a stress position in the sentence.
The focus is invisible to us, but hugely important. It tells us what the sentence is about. Then we process everything else in the sentence in terms of that focus. So in the first one, the dog chased the cat, we take all the chasing in the cat and we refer it back to the dog, and then we think, I don't care about the dog.
So we have to process it into being focused on the cat. But this focus, focus position, once we get it, we actually then don't attend to it. It's not visible to us. What's more visible to us is what comes in the end of the sentence, which is what we call a stress position.
So your point's really beautifully taken. It turns out these two parts of a sentence have very different functions for readers. Your job is of course to control both parts for readers.
And if you're curious about how this works, well let me give you an example real quick of how to do it. Turn now to page... Turn it up to page 11. I'm going to read this out loud.
I'd like you to just underline the subjects of the sentences. Because in English, four times out of five, there's plenty of exceptions, but four times out of five, the focus is just the subject of the sentence. The subject is just what the sentence is about.
So, for example, in recent years, several attempts have been made to discover an overall structural pattern in the book of Amos. What's the subject of that sentence? Anybody? Several attempts? Underline several attempts.
Everybody on the same page with me? All right, underline several attempts, that's the subject. Certainly inspired by... by the burgeoning interest in literary approaches to the Bible, these studies have divided Amos into a relatively small number of extended sections. Underline these studies.
That's the subject of that sentence. A comparison of these studies, however, soon reveals considerable diversity among them. Comparison of the studies is the subject. Underline that. Thus, to look no further than the authors mentioned in footnote 1, the following divergent analyses of chapter 3 to 6 have been proposed.
Underline the following divergent analyses. Only one more paragraph. The only points these scholars are all agreed on are that 5.1 begins a new section, although I shall argue below that it does not, and 6.14 closes a section, which has long been recognized.
So we have the only points these scholars are all agreed on, all of that is a subsection. subject of the sentence are. Two things to note.
First, can you see how the writer is constructing a problem? Can you see how he's looking at his reader's eyes and saying you're wrong? Do you see the language where he's doing that? Several attempts have been made to to discover an overall structure, certainly inspired by interest in literary approaches, each of which, in parentheses, it is claimed. Can you see the force of that?
It is claimed. What does that mean? That means it's wrong. And then he says, a comparison of these studies, however, soon reveals considerable diversity among them.
What he's doing is he's looking into his reader's eyes and saying, I know what you think about the Book of Amos, and you're wrong. But now turn to the next page. Now I'd like you to underline the subjects as I go through here.
Does the Book of Amos have an overall structural pattern? How should such a pattern be characterized? How does its presence or absence shape the text?
So the subjects were the Book of Amos, such a pattern, its presence or absence. Recently, the Book of Amos has been considered to be divided into blah, blah, blah, blah. The subject was the Book of Amos.
Keep underlining. The sections and their interrelations then reveal an essential structure. Underline the sections and their interrelations. However, the nature or even the existence of an overall pattern is not clear.
The subject is the nature or even the existence of an overall pattern. All that's a subject. Next sentence.
The book has been divided according to quite different schemes. The book is the subject. We're going to do one more. One C. Same thing.
I want you to go through and underline the subjects. Does the book of Amos have an overall structural pattern? Subject was book of Amos. How should we characterize such a pattern? Subject was we.
How is our interpretation of the text shaped by such a pattern? Subject was our interpretation of the text. In the past decades, our readings of scriptural texts have come to be increasingly influenced by literary approach of the Bible. Subject was our readings of scriptural texts. In the case of the book of Amos, we've been made aware that the text is divided.
Subject was we. Last sentence, we have come to see a unity and connectedness in the book that was previously. neglected. Subject was we.
Next one, but is what we see really there? Subject was we. So we got three different versions of this paragraph, this opening.
Which one's best? No. God. Which one's best?
No. I apparently have failed in my gold today. I said from now on, when anybody asks you about a text, you should say what? Who's reading it and what's its function?
You were trying to answer the question without knowing who the readers were. Some readers would prefer one, some readers would prefer two, some readers would prefer three. Depends on what they want to focus on in their thinking.
The first one is focused on what? What's the first one focused on? Look at those subjects.
What are those subjects referring to? Studies of the Book of Amos. Number two, what's that focused on? The Book of Amos. What's three focused on?
Readers of the Book of Amos. See the difference? Sometimes people pay me stupid amounts of money to fly to often wonderful cities, walk in and sit down with them and make them take their pen out and underline the subjects of their sentences.
Because they're saying to me, my readers don't find this valuable, or I can't get this published, or I can't get promoted, or I can't get whatever. And we sit down and we take out a pencil and we underline the subject of their sentences. And I can say, do your readers care about this?
And they say, no. I say, okay, we can fix this. We're going to figure out what your readers care about, what they want to focus on, and we're going to put that in the subject position. Why do smart people not know this?
You are all very smart people. I'll end again. Because you've been trained to think that your writing is about showing what you think. And what you care about. In school, that's what its function was.
And the hardest transition I know of is to stop your habits of thinking of writing as revealing yourself. That's not going to happen anymore. Okay, I'm sorry, I've held you late.
Good luck guys. At the end of this handout you'll see some exercises that I encourage you to do in terms of rewriting some sentences. But also, one of the joys of being director of the writing program at the University of Chicago is that anybody on this campus can send me an email, make an appointment, and we can sit down and look at their work. So if any of this stuff or for any other reason you want to talk about writing, send me an email. We'll make an appointment and we'll sit down and talk about it.